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Towards an automated masking process: a model-based approach

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journal contribution
posted on 2018-10-09, 10:07 authored by Khaled Elgeneidy, Ali Al-Yacoub, Zahid Usman, Niels Lohse, Michael R. Jackson, Iain Wright
The masking of aircraft engine parts, such as turbine blades, is a major bottleneck for the aerospace industry. The process is often carried out manually in multiple stages of coating and curing, which requires extensive time and introduces variations in the masking quality. This paper investigates the automation of the masking process utilising the wellestablished time-pressure (T/P) dispensing process for controlled maskant dispensing, and a robotic manipulator for accurate part handling. A mathematical model for the T/P dispensing process was derived, extending previous models from the literature by incorporating the robot velocity for controlled masking line width. An experiment was designed, based on the theoretical analysis of the dispensing process, to derive an empirical model from the generated data that incorporates the losses that are otherwise difficult to model mathematically. The model was validated under new input conditions to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach and the masking accuracy using the derived model.

Funding

The reported work has been partially funded by the EPSRC Centre for Innovated Manufacturing in Intelligent Automation (EP/IO33467/1).

History

School

  • Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering

Published in

Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part B: Journal of Engineering Manufacture

Citation

ELGENEIDY, K. ... et al, 2018. Towards an automated masking process: a model-based approach. Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part B: Journal of Engineering Manufacture, 233 (9), pp.1923-1933.

Publisher

SAGE Publications (© IMechE)

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Acceptance date

2018-09-28

Publication date

2018-11-03

Notes

This paper was published in the journal Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part B: Journal of Engineering Manufacture and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1177/0954405418810058.

ISSN

0954-4054

eISSN

2041-2975

Language

  • en

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